Teaching Philosophy:

Dr. Alok Srivastava

This is more about "facilitation of learning," even though I am calling this my teaching philosophy. I have outlined the general nature of my approach to create opportunities for you to acquire and develop skills that will prove to be valuable in your life. In an era of continuous improvement, interdisciplinary integration, and short lifecycle of skills (life-long learning), my motivation is to help you build confidence and prepare you for "Just-In-Time" training. The world is rapidly adopting the "open-systems" model for knowledge creation, dissemination, and use - which is making it necessary for me to try the approaches described below. Please provide me your input as I try to make a transition into developing a web-based environment for your learning.  

Collaborative Learning:

I strongly advocate team-oriented learning in my class. I recommend that you work in groups (of three) and contribute equally to all group efforts. I believe that the best strategy for this course is to create a structure of topics, provide several opportunities to bring related topics into perspective, and create an environment that facilitates implementation of concepts into meaningful applications. The motivation is to accomplish synergy through sharing of information and skills. You will make your projects available to everyone by publishing them to your websites. Please visit and contribute to the discussions on the bulletin/message board.

"Learning by Doing" Model for Pedagogy:

This model (constuctivism) calls for facilitation of learning versus the traditional approach of instructor-imparted teaching (objectivism). I will provide you with several opportunities to apply concepts and techniques to "real-world like" cases. This kind of integration/synthesis of knowledge from diverse sources is necessary to be able to create meaningful IT solutions/applications. An important part of this approach is "reverse engineering" to learn systems/model development. I will provide examples of solutions to cases and we will reverse engineer these solutions to gain a better understanding of the modeling process.

Student-Centered Learning:

This approach encourages you to develop your own context for learning. Meaning and relevancy of concepts can be highly enhanced if you think of an application scenario in your profession and be able to use ideas covered in the course to enhance existing methods. I recommend that you demonstrate the application of the techniques covered in this course to “real-world” situations. Select projects from your work environment or from an area of your interest. Your projects should reflect applications that demonstrate improvement over conventional methods and cover technology skills that are considered current.  

Covering all aspects of Knowledge Acquisition:

I will try to create opportunities for you to acquire all aspects of knowledge associated with the content of this course. These aspects are : Know-what, Know-how, Know-why, and Care-why. Know-what is associated with the understanding of concepts and techniques. Know-how is the understanding related to the application of concepts/techniques. Know-why is an understanding of the relevance and appropriateness of the application to real-world situations. Care-why is something you need to think about (this aspect of knowledge acquisition is more about you than the content of any course). All of your projects should cover each of these aspects of knowledge.

Online Learning

Those of you who are in my “online” class will have to quickly get used to “self-directed” and ”independent” learning. I will provide you with a structure of topics, assignments, and support material for each class. We will meet in a chat room and discuss issues around each topic.

Electronic chat rooms will be utilized for synchronous discussions. A chat room has limited capabilities and is a dramatically different environment compared to the traditional (face-to-face) classroom. Please do not expect this mode to be a substitute for classroom lectures. You will have to come prepared to each class, pose questions, and provide your insights/answers. I will be using the Socratic method, so come prepared to answer several questions. Transcripts of each chat session (online class) will be posted for your review on the next day. All of us are new to this environment – let us find out what can be accomplished. Please provide feedback on your experiences and suggest ways to make this interaction more meaningful.

Electronic Bulletin/Message Boards will be utilized for asynchronous discussions. Please participate and contribute your answers and insights to questions that are posed on the message board. This is where you can expect more detailed responses from others. I will be managing the content of the message board and may have to delete items from time to time.

Email:

Information Sharing on the Internet: